Fools' paradise A

Revisiting some of the finest April 1 pranks ever

March 31, 2006|By Charles Leroux, Tribune senior correspondent

The first of April is the day we remember what we are the other 364 days of the year.

-- Mark Twain

On April 1, 2003, Abbas Khalaf Kunfuth, the Iraqi ambassador to Russia, stepped onto a podium in Moscow to address the international press. Most in the crowd expected to hear him concede defeat for his nation. After all, thousands of American-led coalition forces were sweeping through Iraq. Kunfuth held up what he said was a bulletin from Reuters news service.

"The Americans," he read, "have accidentally fired a nuclear missile into British forces, killing seven."

Despite a few such enormously inappropriate and maladroit examples, the prank played to salute the first day of April remains an honored tradition through most of the world.

The origins of April Fool's Day go back, some say, to 16th Century France, others say, further. In some accounts, the day of trickery is tied to a rite of spring, in others to the change from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar. In 1983, an Associated Press story attempted to set the record straight, quoting Joseph Boskin, a history professor at Boston University, who had researched the subject.

He said that the practice began during the reign of Roman emperor Constantine, when his court's jesters and fools claimed they could do a better job of running the empire. Constantine allowed a jester named Kugel to be king for a day. Kugel passed an edict calling for nothing but absurdity on that day, and the custom became an annual event. Shortly after the AP story ran, it came to light that Professor Boskin was a prankster and the explanation was just one more April Fool's Day prank.

Alex Boese (pronounced burr-za), on the other hand, is a historian of hoaxes. He has collected scores of them in his 2002 book, "Museum of Hoaxes," and his Web site www.museumofhoaxes.com. He has recently published "Hippo Eats Dwarf: A Field Guide to Hoaxes and Other BS."

"When I was a grad student in history at the University of California San Diego," he said. "I'd read references to hoaxes and pranks, track them down and make notes on them. Then I started going through microfilm for various newspapers looking at the April 1 editions going back into the 19th Century. You have to go through the whole week though, because the hoax isn't always identified as such right away."

Boese's research turned up an announcement in the April 1, 1878, edition of the New York Graphic newspaper, that Thomas Edison had invented a machine able to transform soil directly into cereal and water directly into wine, thereby ending world hunger. Newspapers throughout America copied the article, heaping lavish praise on Edison.

The Buffalo Commercial Advertiser was particularly effusive in its praise, waxing eloquent about Edison's brilliance in a long editorial. A few days later, the Graphic reprinted the Advertiser's editorial in full, placing above it a simple, triumphant headline: "They Bite!"

Boese said he thinks that prank worked because Edison had invented the phonograph just the year before, and the nation thought he was a miracle-worker. "The trick to a really good prank," Boese said, "is to have it be substantially absurd but believable to some gullible people."

Proposal to change pi

A case in point: In the April, 1998, issue of an online newsletter published by New Mexicans for Science and Reason there appeared an article claiming that the Alabama legislature had voted to change the value of pi from 3.14159 to the "Biblical value" of 3.0.

Aerospace engineers and others in the scientific community were quoted opposing the legislation then awaiting only the governor's signature. One, professor Kim Johanson, a mathematician from the University of Alabama, said that pi is a universal constant and cannot arbitrarily be changed. It has an infinite number of digits after the decimal point and can never be known exactly. The article also quoted the bill's sponsor, Leonard Lee Lawson (R-Crossville), who questioned the usefulness of any number that cannot be calculated exactly, and suggested that never knowing the exact answer could harm students' self-esteem.

"We need to return to some absolutes in our society," Lawson was said to have said.

"We just thought we'd have a little fun," said Dave Thomas, president of New Mexicans for Science and Reason, "but our little joke got out of control."

Through the magic of the Internet, the piece flew around the globe, turning up in such exotic locals as a German chat room dedicated to singer Tori Amos. Thomas, who works for a company that makes test equipment for things like auto parts, tracked the flight on his computer. "It was," he said, "like being in the control room watching the virus spread in "24."